Extension for v1.1 - 1.6b2


KM Extension <-- Right-Click to auto-install w/KEM

Download (external location)

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For those who have switched to Firefox, I ported microRSS to Firefox if you would like to use it. If you do use it, please consider leaving a review, it helps to promote Firefox extensions. You can just copy your feeds.xml to your Firefox profile. Hotkey is Ctrl-M and button can be added to toolbar. If you localized it, please send me the localization file(s).
Thanks, snuz2.

microRSS for Firefox

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MicroRSS v1.8beta is available for KM1.6. It is very snappy with the new faster javascript engine, at least on a fast connection that is...

What is it ?? A compact, simple, RSS feed reader that organzies RSS feeds and loads them, it only takes up about 14K. It will allow podcasts to be downloaded from feeds.


New Features for 1.8:
- Accepts URL's from Feed Subscribe extension.
- Only one instance at a time is allowed now. So that the feed import will work.
- Now distributed only in KM extension manager format. Those who don't use the Ext Manager should know by now how to do a manual install.
- The splash page indicates v1.8beta as there is a hack to keep the dialog windows from being full page size. Unfortunately they still appear in the upper left corner. If and when Kmeleon fixes this, I will remove the hack and the "beta".

To localizers: Note that there are changes in the last 6 entries of the microrss.dtd locale file mostly having to do with the new Feed Subscribe interface.

New Features for 1.7:
- asynchronous feed loading, will not lock kmeleon if feed doesn't load.
- compatible with new gecko engine.
- slight change to the button layout because the delete button on the right corner looks an awful lot like a window close button, but does something very different...
- better handling of bad url's, no long timeout waits in most cases.
- The splash page indicates v1.7beta as there is a hack to keep the dialog windows from being full page size. Unfortunately they still appear in the upper left corner. If and when Kmeleon fixes this, I will remove the hack and the "beta".

To localizers: Note that there is a small change in the last 3 entries of the microrss.dtd locale file.



Edited 9 time(s). Last edit at 12/08/2012 03:30AM by snuz2.

snuz2:

Thank-you very much for MicroRSS v1.7beta.

For this user, a much appreciated addition to K-Meleon 1.6 Beta and hopefully, all future K-Meleon releases.

I find this RSS reader superior for my needs.

Sliderule

Quote
snuz2
MicroRSS v1.7beta is available for KM1.6. It is very snappy with the new faster javascript engine, at least on a fast connection that is...

snuz2,

Couldn't get it recognized... it seems that newsfox is still loaded up somewhere. (prefs???) even though I thought I had zipped it up and removed it from chrome, macros and profiles.

N

There is no reason to remove Newsfox. You probably just need to turn on the macro for microrss in your prefs:macro extensions selections to put it in the toolbars and menus. You will know it is installed when you see its entry under the Tools menu.
If it still doesn't work, please be more specific about your symptoms...

Quote
snuz2
There is no reason to remove Newsfox. You probably just need to turn on the macro for microrss in your prefs:macro extensions selections to put it in the toolbars and menus. You will know it is installed when you see its entry under the Tools menu.
If it still doesn't work, please be more specific about your symptoms...

snuz2,

I end up with two orange RSS icons and the RSS icon in Privacy bar continues to point to NewsFox.

What I would like to be able to do is to entirely remove all traces of NewsFox, make the privacy bar RSS icon point to microrss. I see several lines of code in preferences to newsfox which I could manually delete. Right now, I'm back to restored copy of KM 1.6beta 1 with newsfox until I can be sure that I can install micross successfully.

N

@snuz2
I uploaded it to KEC and linked to it in your post. The rssTool.bmp is in skins/default. This prevents the user from having to manually place it into the specific skin folder being used. The macro has been edited accordingly. For future versions, making it compatible w/KEM is fairly simple. See here, or better yet, just follow the structure of the 7z file uploaded.

Also, I was looking to see if it can be made compatible w/Feed Subscribe. Is there a way or is it easy for you to create a way for the add feed dialog to read urls sent to it or be able to bypass the dialogue and append the url to a subscription string w/o creating any substantial bloat? For Newsfox, all that's required is to append the feed url to:

chrome://newsfox/content/addurl.xul?

I was looking to see if there was a way to do so for MicroRSS. It would make adding new feeds significantly easier for users.

@jsnj:
To clarify: microrss v1.7 is compatible with older kmeleon as well as new (afaik). No need for double versions.

re: feed subscribing enhancement
I think it can be done, sort of. The string you posted looks like it just a small subapplication that puts the feed info into the subscribe file.
But where to put it? If you notice, you can't move feeds around in microrss, just their order in a folder and the order of folders. Do you have any suggestions how to handle this? A large part of microrss is just the control that displays the tree of folders; if the small subapplication displays that it might make it significantly bigger. Alternative suggestions welcomed, but there is another problem as well.

Also, it would not show up if you were running microrss at the same time, worse yet, it could be overwritten (erased) if you are running microrss and you do anything that causes a change to the subscription file (even the state of folders open/close is in there). Because the version saved in the file ( with the new subscription) will be overwritten with what's changed in the running microrss. I'm not sure how to handle that... ideas welcome!

The traditional way to load a feed into microrss is to get the add feed dialog, go back to the window where the feed is from, drag the url into the dialog. This got broken by a bug in XUL, and is not so convenient now that tabbed browsing is the norm. Generally it's easiest now to "Copy link URL" and paste it in.

@ndbord
There is no way you can make your old icon point to microrss without editing the toolbar config files. You would delete the part referring to newsfox and paste in the parts referring to microrss. Personally, I wouldn't bother. But you didn't tell me if microrss is even working? Is your only problem the appearance of the toolbars then?

If by preferences, you mean about:config list of thousands of prefs, changing those will not remove or alter what you want. I would think that by just unchecking newsfox in the preferences:macro extension check boxes, it will go away.

If you are really desperate you could send me your toolbars.cfg and I could patch it up for you.



Edited 7 time(s). Last edit at 01/17/2011 08:31AM by snuz2.

Quote
snuz2
If by preferences, you mean about:config list of thousands of prefs, changing those will not remove or alter what you want. I would think that by just unchecking newsfox in the preferences:macro extension check boxes, it will go away.

If you are really desperate you could send me your toolbars.cfg and I could patch it up for you.

snuz2,

Sorry, my bad. What I meant by toolbar is the "privacy" toolbar RSS icon which insists upon loading up newsfox.

--------

RSS{
macros(RSS)
Read RSS Feeds
toolhot.bmp[22]
toolcold.bmp[22]
}

--------

But I don't see that macro in KMM macro folder???

N

You have an RSS reader button on your privacy toolbar? Sure it's not in your mail/news toolbar? that's where it normally resides. if you change macros(RSS) to macros(microrss) it should launch microrss. If you want to hide this button, just put # in front of all 6 lines. Done. But... this is just cosmetic... read on ....

But it has to be installed first, that's why I keep asking you about checkboxes in preferences dialog. If you hit F2, you see the big old prefs dialog. Under Kmeleon Plugins, there is a Macro Extension panel. Select it. You should see a list of macros that are available ( that is, they have a .kmm file installed). You can select and unselect them there. There is no need to go messing around with folders and such. Make sure Newsfox is unchecked, it's menus and toolbar will go away. Make sure microrss is listed, if not, you must install it. If it is, make sure it's checked.
If you don't like microrss having it's own toolbar, you can go to View:Toolbars and hide it. You could then use the procedure above to link the other privacy button to microrss. You have to edit the toolbars.cfg for the skin you are using. Each skin has its own.

Quote
snuz2
@jsnj:
To clarify: microrss v1.7 is compatible with older kmeleon as well as new (afaik). No need for double versions.

Thanks for clarifying. Fixed.

Quote
snuz2
re: feed subscribing enhancement
I think it can be done, sort of. The string you posted looks like it just a small subapplication that puts the feed info into the subscribe file.
But where to put it? If you notice, you can't move feeds around in microrss, just their order in a folder and the order of folders. Do you have any suggestions how to handle this? A large part of microrss is just the control that displays the tree of folders; if the small subapplication displays that it might make it significantly bigger. Alternative suggestions welcomed, but there is another problem as well.

Also, it would not show up if you were running microrss at the same time, worse yet, it could be overwritten (erased) if you are running microrss and you do anything that causes a change to the subscription file (even the state of folders open/close is in there). Because the version saved in the file ( with the new subscription) will be overwritten with what's changed in the running microrss. I'm not sure how to handle that... ideas welcome!

The traditional way to load a feed into microrss is to get the add feed dialog, go back to the window where the feed is from, drag the url into the dialog. This got broken by a bug in XUL, and is not so convenient now that tabbed browsing is the norm. Generally it's easiest now to "Copy link URL" and paste it in.

Unfortunately, I don't think I have the knowledge to offer any suggestions really. In Newsfox, each feed is saved to its own xml file in the users profile folder unlike microRSS which saves them all to one single xml file. Not sure if that's how Newsfox avoids the overwrite issues or simply because Newsfox is opened first before its addurl dialog appears. Is it possible to make the dialog read URLs sent to it, placing the actual URL into the URL line with maybe some sort of checking mechanism to make sure microRSS is opened first so that the dialog opens from within microRSS so to speak? Right now, if chrome://microrss/content/dialog.xul is invoked it resizes the browser because of the aforementioned bug. Hope I'm making sense.

uhh, no, you can't just send the URL to the dialog, it won't know what to do with it and it needs the full microrss app to put it into the subscriptions tree...

I have thought of some solutions though...the scenario is that microrss could be made to grab the new URL when it is launched. It could then check to see if another instance of itself is running and close it. Then the user could be prompted for a location (click in the subscriptions tree to select) and the feed installed in the subscriptions. This could be relatively painless to code, provided I can make the two instances communicate with each other in case someone tries to add a feed while looking at another one. (which I think is likely). And I can make one instance close the other, never tried that before.

the main side effects of this would be (1) always launches urss when adding a new feed - seems like you'd want to do this anyway. (2) closes former instance of urss when you launch a new one or add a feed. - might look a little funny...

what you think?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/18/2011 02:09AM by snuz2.

Quote
snuz2
uhh, no, you can't just send the URL to the dialog, it won't know what to do with it and it needs the full microrss app to put it into the subscriptions tree...
I have thought of some solutions though...the scenario is that microrss could be made to grab the new URL when it is launched. It could then check to see if another instance of itself is running and close it. Then the user could be prompted for a location (click in the subscriptions tree to select) and the feed installed in the subscriptions. This could be relatively painless to code, provided I can make the two instances communicate with each other in case someone tries to add a feed while looking at another one. (which I think is likely). And I can make one instance close the other, never tried that before.

the main side effects of this would be (1) always launches urss when adding a new feed - seems like you'd want to do this anyway. (2) closes former instance of urss when you launch a new one or add a feed. - might look a little funny...

what you think?

re(2) Doesn't sound like much of a side effect to me if I'm understanding you correctly. Depends on what is shown when the former closes and the prompt appears I guess. I don't think anyone using the feature would care much. You could probably find a way to make it look pretty eventually Sorry I can't be of more assistance.

okay. i am working on it. may take a week or so as i find time....

Moving, moving to new KM version

As we won't have an Aggreg8 for this new GRE :_( (bye, bye, my beloved RSS reader), now I'm testing yours and few thing to improve (based on my experience with Aggreg8):

1.- skinning, not skins by images, but the ability to switch to different CSS colors as with Aggreg8. I did manually on Aggreg8, but one darker would be good (for me, of course). I didn't dig on it to make my own, yet, BTW, but, anyway, would be awesome if you include that feature.

2.- clicking, why 2 clics to open a RSS or "folder"? why needed? I think it's better to just point and open. I hope this is not a new behavior of the new GRE..., (another one :-/)

3.- feeds.xml formatting, as sometimes we'll need to edit feeds.xml manually, as with Aggreg8, would be interesting to format it to be clearer. As follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feeds>
	<category>
		<feed>
			<URL></URL>
		</feed>
	</category>
	<category>
		<category>
			<feed>
				<URL></URL>
			</feed>
		</category>
		<feed>
			<URL></URL>
		</feed>
		<feed>
			<URL></URL>
		</feed>
	</category>
</feeds>

The formatting doesn't affect to MicroRSS functionality. TESTED without errors.

4.- view feed source, sometimes it's useful to check it.


Thanks to read this



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 01/21/2011 02:46AM by JohnHell.

1. I have no idea what you mean? What colors? What darker? If you want to skin it though, I can tell you how if you don't already know.

2. One click selects the item in the tree, necessary to move it, get its props or delete it. Two clicks opens it. Just like anything else in Windows.

3. What is the difference between your proposal and how it is formatted now? the indentations?
Plus, I don't think you'll need to edit it, why would you? If you mean view it, just view it a real xml editor and it will be very pretty. But computers do not write xml files like that, it's just how the viewer shows it. When the computer generates xml (serializes it), it looks just like that, that's why there are viewers.

4. To view the feed source, just copy its url from the properties and paste it into the address bar. It will even format it for you.

microrss is micro. it's 1/10th the size of aggreg8 and 1/75th the size of newsfox. I am very careful how I bloat it. the only suggestion here that wouldn't increase it's size is number 4, but i don't think that's important enough to do either since it just takes 4 mouseclicks and is already built-in to kmeleon.
sorry, i won't be implementing any of these, but thanks for your comments. i encourage you to send more.

Quote
snuz2
1. I have no idea what you mean? What colors? What darker? If you want to skin it though, I can tell you how if you don't already know.

I know what to change to make my own, I only was suggesting to make available different themes, as with Aggreg8. This one had a drop down menu to change them to green, grey, blue and red.

Quote
snuz2
2. One click selects the item in the tree, necessary to move it, get its props or delete it. Two clicks opens it. Just like anything else in Windows.

Move? Move what? The move doesn't work for me. Yes, I clic and drag, but no where to move. It ends in the same position. I can't change order of feeds or move inside other category. Does it really work? :-?
EDIT: Forgot that, I see the arrows. I misunderstood you. Anyway, with the arrows you can't change the category (move a feed inside other category).

Clicking, well, is a good that point of view, but I prefer to just clic, not double clic just to open.

I'll have a look to the code too, to see if I can change myself :/

Quote
snuz2
3. What is the difference between your proposal and how it is formatted now? the indentations?

Yes

Quote
snuz2
Plus, I don't think you'll need to edit it, why would you?

For the reason explained. I can't move the feeds or changes their categories dragging and dropping.

Quote
snuz2
If you mean view it, just view it a real xml editor and it will be very pretty. But computers do not write xml files like that, it's just how the viewer shows it. When the computer generates xml (serializes it), it looks just like that, that's why there are viewers.

Pretty? what pretty way? color codes? Yes, that is good, but I have to use an editor with color codes (notepad2 if I'm not wrong) to just make a little change...

Quote
snuz2
4. To view the feed source, just copy its url from the properties and paste it into the address bar. It will even format it for you.

So: clic on feed, clic on properties button, highlight URL, copy, open new window, paste, intro.

I think that, at least, it should have a menu entry such as open in new window or a button to open in new window.

Just another suggestion.

Quote
snuz2
microrss is micro. it's 1/10th the size of aggreg8 and 1/75th the size of newsfox. I am very careful how I bloat it. the only suggestion here that wouldn't increase it's size is number 4, but i don't think that's important enough to do either since it just takes 4 mouseclicks and is already built-in to kmeleon.
sorry, i won't be implementing any of these, but thanks for your comments. i encourage you to send more.

Thank to you to read them, anyway :/



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/22/2011 04:11PM by JohnHell.

If you make a new color scheme, send it to me and maybe we can offer more than one. I'm sure my choices aren't the best for everyone.

And I am thinking for other reasons as well to make it possible to move a feed out of a category to a new one. But there are no menus and no easy way to make them in microrss. In general, adding the functionality of a feature is pretty easy, integrating it into the interface is harder and takes way more code and time. I did think of a way to pop the source code up though, if the feed is read with say, shift down, I could skip interpreting it and just pop it into the window. That wouldn't take much.

None of your suggestions have anything to do with reading rss feeds. They concern maintenance. Do you think the average web user needs to see the xml source? Or edit an xml file? These tools are available elsewhere.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/23/2011 02:52AM by snuz2.

Quote
snuz2
If you make a new color scheme, send it to me and maybe we can offer more than one. I'm sure my choices aren't the best for everyone.

Not a big deal, just set the background color of body and the .il class to another one. That's enough for an effect. In my case I set #858585 and #AAAAAA respectively.

Or, in other words, change the values of body{} and .il{}.

Maybe a JS function to switch between different predetermined color combinations and stored as a permanent preference in prefs.js.

Quote
snuz2
I did think of a way to pop the source code up though, if the feed is read with say, shift down, I could skip interpreting it and just pop it into the window. That wouldn't take much.

If found easy to implement, go for it But I vote for a button, to avoid more dependencies on mouse clics events.

Quote
snuz2
None of your suggestions have anything to do with reading rss feeds. They concern maintenance. Do you think the average web user needs to see the xml source? Or edit an xml file? These tools are available elsewhere.

When something goes wrong, I check what is going wrong.

You know the community we are now. K-meleon, the browser you control.

Your RSS reader is more complex than a macro, but is the same, letting us to control the browser as other made in the past macros to control how the Net is displayed with K-meleon

Anyway, I understand if you don't complicate things. We all have our time and if the benefit is not enough, is better to leave. Don't worry. And I apologize if I sound complaining in my messages.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/23/2011 05:55PM by JohnHell.

Awesome. Now go into tree.htm and find the function drawFeedTree. You will see that the subscription tree is made from ordinary hyperlinks in a recursive function. You can interchange the click events on the hyperlinks to make single click open, and double click select. On about the 3rd line of the function. Let me know how (or if) it works.

Quote
snuz2
Awesome. Now go into tree.htm and find the function drawFeedTree. You will see that the subscription tree is made from ordinary hyperlinks in a recursive function. You can interchange the click events on the hyperlinks to make single click open, and double click select. On about the 3rd line of the function. Let me know how (or if) it works.

Interchange has no very much sense as everytime you click... you know and in the other hand, the onclick event just has a "return false" statement.

But, well, yes, it works

   .
   .
   .
function drawFeedTree( s, f, indent)  {
if  (f.nodeType == 1) {
    if (f.attributes.length>1) {
        s += '<x href="#" name="' + f.getAttribute('id') + '" \
                onFocus="selectFeed(this)" onClick="handleDblClick(); return false;"';
   .
   .
   .

Just one thing, as 'f.nodeType' could be (I don't know what defines), I guess, the definition of the type of node, feed or folder, it would be better to add that type to avoid the click on folder cause a close of that folder. For folders might be more interesting the double click event.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/26/2011 09:48PM by JohnHell.

Yeah, I didn't try it. I guess you would switch with onFocus rather than onClick or something. Well, you can figure it out. I think it had the event onFocus because one used to be able to use keyboard navigation to select and read the feeds, but that's gone in the next version anyways. As long as you can read and select, it can work for you.

And I agree, there is a logic to making it single click, because 99% of the time you just want to open it. But this is not how people expect it to work, so it will stay double click in the official distribution. But for you, you have custom installation now.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/26/2011 10:06PM by snuz2.

Quote
snuz2
And I agree, there is a logic to making it single click, because 99% of the time you just want to open it. But this is not how people expect it to work, so it will stay double click in the official distribution. But for you, you have custom installation now.

Ok, I'll save like gold my "mod" files

Not a microRSS issue, I guess, because I swear it loaded images from this feed correctly, and now it doesn't. I think they changed their feed :/

I'm almost sure it loaded before because I thought that I'll have to set max-width to the images loaded in the right pane, as I did with Aggreg8 to fit the size the pane with my screen size.

Have a look just in case happens in future feeds too:
http://feeds.boston.com/boston/bigpicture/index

they could have changed the formatting in the feed, or it could be microrss, the problem is that there is no standard for what kind of html can be put into a feed. there is no setting that works flawlessly on all sites, I just try to find a good compromise. maybe mozilla doesn't recognize that they are images because they are in a hyperlink? who knows? i even try to turn on the kmeleon automatic resizer...no luck.

you can use ctrl-mousewheel to zoom them out however...

if you turn off feed images, you will see that the text also has an enormous right margin by itself, so it's some stupid tag they put in I think. while not real common, dumb things like this do tend to happen in feeds because there are so many feed browsers and absolutely no standard of what each item should or could contain, and nobody cares about feeds anyway.

MicroRSS v1.8beta is available for KM1.6. Adds compatibility with Feed Subscribe extension...

What is it ?? A compact, simple, RSS feed reader that organzies RSS feeds and loads them, it only takes up about 14K. It will allow podcasts to be downloaded from feeds.

New Features for 1.8:
- Accepts URL's from Feed Subscribe extension.
- Only one instance at a time is allowed now. So that the feed import will work.
- Now distributed only in KM extension manager format. Those who don't use the Ext Manager should know by now how to do a manual install.
- The splash page indicates v1.8beta as there is a hack to keep the dialog windows from being full page size. Unfortunately they still appear in the upper left corner. If and when Kmeleon fixes this, I will remove the hack and the "beta".

To localizers: Note that there are changes in the last 6 entries of the microrss.dtd locale file mostly having to do with the new Feed Subscribe interface.

---

Direct Download



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/28/2011 10:11AM by snuz2.

Version 1.9b of microrss has been released.

What is it ?? A compact, simple, RSS feed reader that organzies RSS feeds and loads them, it only takes up about 14K. It will allow podcasts to be downloaded from feeds.

New Features for 1.9:
- Compatible with Gecko from FF3.6. A minor change was needed to a XUL tag to make the microrss app fill the window(tab) fully. If you are running KM1.7, you need this tweak.
- The splash page indicates v1.9beta as there is a hack to keep the dialog windows from being full page size. Unfortunately they still appear in the upper left corner. If and when Kmeleon fixes this, I will remove the hack and the "beta".

---

Direct Download



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/01/2011 06:15AM by snuz2.

Quote
snuz2
Version 1.9b of microrss has been released.

snuz2,

Many thanks... duly installed in 1.7.

N

bump only...